When the Bauer commercial featuring Patrick Kane's magical stickhandling skill went viral on YouTube this season, even some of Kane's hockey buddies believed special effects were required.

The Chicago Blackhawks star guides a puck, at rapid speed, through a ring of four pucks, then 20 pucks and finally 40 pucks in spellbinding fashion.

"He had played overseas with (Dallas Stars center) Tyler Seguin, so he knew him," said Kane's father, Pat Sr. "And Seguin texted him, 'Kaner, is that real?' Pat got a huge kick out of that. Even some of his teammates weren't sure."

The truth is everything on the video 3 million people have viewed is real, except Kane breaking the camera lens. It took him only 20 minutes to film the sequence.

"What we were amazed at is that not one of his skates even touched a puck while he was doing that," his father said.

Certainly no one who knew Kane growing up in Buffalo was surprised by his stick-handling artistry. Kane never was without a stick in his hand and a ball on its blade. Golf ball. Hard plastic balls. Weighted balls. Whatever was available, Kane used.

"When we would travel to tournaments, he would stickhandle into the hotels," Pat Sr. said. "We would go in the back door, and he would stickhandle up the stairs to the second or third floor."

Kane was the ultimate rink rat. One season, his dad estimates he played 300 games. He moved away, for hockey reasons, when he was a high school freshman. He played at Detroit Country Day for a year, then played for the U.S. National Team Development Program and then finally for the London Knights in the Ontario Hockey League.

"It was for the love of the game," said his mother, Donna. "Every decision he made was about how much hockey he was going to play."

Along the way, his skills kept getting better and mental toughness kept getting stronger to the point that today he is considered the USA's best offensive weapon going into the Sochi Olympics, where the Americans will try to improve on their 2010 silver medal.

"I think he's the best American player in the game right now," said NBC analyst Ed Olczyk, a former NHL player and coach.

Those gifts are why the Blackhawks drafted Kane No. 1 overall in 2007 and are what helped him win two Stanley Cups, a rookie of the year award and playoff MVP last season. But Kane has made himself a better player by adding a layer of ferocity to his game. He is 5-11 and 181 pounds and is outweighed by 20 to 30 pounds by most NHL players, yet he finds a means to survive and thrive.

"In his own way, he's as competitive as anyone in the National Hockey League," St. Louis Blues coach Ken Hitchcock said.

Hitchcock said when Kane first came into the league, "you had a 50-50 chance of maybe pushing him out of the competition a little bit."

Today, Hitchcock said, there is no added advantage to playing physical against Kane.

"He is so determined with the puck," Hitchcock said. "You have to (defend) him with positional play and hope you don't get burned. You are not pushing him out."

Kane's determination to succeed was evident at an early age. "He was always going, going and going," Donna Kane recalled. "One morning, he had an early practice, and I had to get him up at 5:30. I said, you have to get up for practice, and he said, 'Ohhhh.'"

Reading the signals that her son needed a break, Donna immediately said he didn't have to go. She wanted him to sleep in.

One summer, over a 10-week span, Kane spent nine weeks in hockey schools in Buffalo. "The 10th week we couldn't find a hockey school for him to go to," Pat Sr. said.

Kane sounds like he is all business, but that is not necessarily the case. Players all embrace the time-honored tradition of the playoff beard, but Kane seems to have his own tradition of growing grows a mullet instead, seemingly because he enjoys his teammates' wisecracks about it.

"I'm probably the guy who keeps it loose around the room," Kane said, "and tries to joke around with guys before the game, keeping things funny."

He is still a rink rat at heart.

"I love the game of hockey," Kane said. "I love being part of it. I think I know a lot about the game. People might not view me as competitive as I really am. That's why I always say myself and (Blackhawks teammate) Johnny (Toews) are very similar in that way. We are both very competitive."

Kane's passion for his work is always evident. USA Hockey director of communications Dave Fischer recalls setting up Kane for an NBC interview and was stunned to hear him talking about the importance of the 1960 gold-medal team. Kane was born in 1988.

New York Islanders (3): John Tavares (Canada), Thomas Vanek, Michael Grabner (Austria). Lubomir Visnovsky was named to Team Slovakia, but didn't get team clearance to go to Sochi because he only returned from a concussion.
Charles Cherney, AP

"I didn't prep him," Fischer said. "I think he even mentioned some names from the team. He just gets it. He is well-tuned in to the game of hockey. He is passionate about it."

An hour after USA had lost the gold-medal game against Canada in 2010, many players, including Kane, were still in the dressing room, still wearing their uniforms, still trying to sort out the loss. Fischer needed someone to talk to the television networks that weren't rights-holders. Kane, then 21, went outside the arena, still in his uniform, and did those interviews.

None of that surprises his father, who had seen his son stay all day at hockey school, even though his session would end at noon. The Kanes had four seats behind the player's bench in Buffalo when Patrick was young, and he would study how players would tape their sticks and analyze how their blades were curved.

Kane's first NHL trading card was issued in 2007, but he and his father appear on Sylvain Turgeon's 1995 trading card, with Kane sitting on his father's lap in the first row at a game in Buffalo.

"He is 5 or 6 years old, and what we notice is that he is not eating popcorn, not eating ice cream," his dad said. "He's not dillydallying. He is watching the game."